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Neville Symington
Neville Symington, a member of the Middle Group of British Psychoanalysts, 'has trodden a long and interesting path...taking him from his birthplace in Portugal, via England, to Australia, and with membership of the Port Wine Trade, the Catholic Church, the Tavistock Clinic, and the British Institute of Psycho-Analysis as stopping-points'.Anton Obholzer, "Foreword", Neville Symington, The making of a psychotherapist (London 1996) p. xi Symington was a Catholic priest, before working at the Tavistock in the 70s and 80s. He emigrated to Australia in 1986, and was President of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society from 1999-2002. On narcissism Symington is perhaps best known for his work on narcissism, producing what has been called his 'very particular, complex, and intriguing understanding....Symington (1993) understands narcissism as the psychopathology that underlies all other'.Marcus West, Feeling, Being, and the Sense of Self (London 2007) p. 205 and p. 200 Symington considered that 'the infant/child becomes narcissistically disordered by making an unconscious choice either towards the lifegiver (its authenticity or spontaneity) or to its disavowal and the use of magical pretence in order to evade psychic reality and to avoid external reality'.James S. Grotstein, "Foreword", Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory (London 1993) p. ix The result of the latter choice is that 'in place of autonomy, the adult...would come to obey an internal source that the psychoanalyst Neville Symington calls the "discordant source"...pathological'.Polly Young-Eisendrath, Women and Desire (London 2000) p. 112-3 Religion and psychoanalysis The origins of his book on narcissism came about, in Symington's words, when 'I started to work on the subject of Psychoanalysis and Religion, and it came to me quite early in that research that the connecting link between the two disciples was narcissism'.Symington, Narcissism p. xvii The two subjects were both very close to Symington's central concerns. 'At one time a Catholic priest, but subsequently Tavistock trained...in later writings, Symington mingled metaphysical faith-claims with his psychology of the mystical'Dan Merkur, in Jacob A. Belzen, Changing the Scientific Study of Religion (2009) p. 128 in what might perhaps be almost seen as a "return of the repressed" (religion) into psychoanalysis. It was a move that created a certain amount of controversy: thus for example Robert M. Young - taking exception to Symington's study of W. R. Bion as 'a very particular, idiosyncratic and controversial rendering of Bion's thinking' - considered that 'the evangelical and pontifical elements of this book are illuminated by his recently declared views on religion'.Robert M. Young Online writings Symington sees 'the psychic process, with its therapeutic arrival at the depressive position, as a process of moral education', declaring that '"Psychoanalysis is a natural religion but not a revealed one"'.Merkur, p. 128 Following that lead, 'many analysts, who have adopted a positive understanding of religion with a Winnicottian twist...make a distinction, in the spirit of the deists, between natural religions and revealed religion...with reference to Symington'.J. Harold Ellens, Religious and Spiritual Events (2008) p. 22 Others however consider that 'Symington's wish to establish a fertile relationship of mutual need between psychoanalysis and religion is based on rather simplistic philosophical arguments', with the result that 'inevitably Symington becomes moralistic'.Gregorio Kohon, No lost certainties to be recovered (London 1999) p. 152 and p. 158 They might favour instead the position that 'though psychoanalysis is not a religion - and is notably insufficient if used as one' - it is nonetheless 'inescapably a moral enterprise - "tending as it does towards greater freedom in the making of moral choices" - that has to work hard not to become a moralistic one'.Nina Coltart, quoted in Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London 1994) p. 138-9 Training, spontaneity, and truth Nina Coltart, in expressing some of her own doubts about psychoanalytic training, noted that 'Neville Symington...is of the opinion that a long personal analysis, which we all have as part of our training, leaves the narcissism stronger, and the ego weaker, than they were at the beginning'.Nina Coltart, The Baby and the Bathwater (London 1996) p. 32 This may perhaps be linked with Symington's early work on the importance of the analyst's spontaneity - 'a therapeutic orientation that has been dramatically captured by the British "middle school" analyst Neville Symington (1983) as "the analyst's act of freedom as agent of therapeutic change"'Charles Spezzano, Affect in Psychoanalysis (2003) p. xiii - as well as with his 'existential point of departure...the unique perspective of profound ontological insecurity'.James S. Grotstein, "Foreword", Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory (London 1993) p. ix Symington maintains that 'truth in psychoanalysis emerges between the analyst and the patient and...demands that a preconception is abandoned in both'.Quoted in Michael Parsons, The Dove that Returns, the Dove that Vanishes (London 2000) p. 150 Publications Joan and Neville Symington, The Clinical Thinking of Wilfrid Bion (1997) See also * True self and false self * Melanie Klein * D. W. Winnicott References Category:Living people Category:British psychoanalysts Category:Psychotherapists Category:Narcissism Category:Year of birth missing